Mission Karmayogi

About

‘Mission Karmayogi’ envisages preparing Indian civil servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled.
The mission is designed to stay rooted in Indian culture and sensibilities while drawing learning resources from the best institutions and practices worldwide.

Need of The Mission

• There is a need to develop domain knowledge besides administrative capacity in the bureaucracy.
• There is a need to formalize the recruitment process and match the public service to a bureaucrat’s competence, to find the right person for the right job.
• The plan is to begin right at the recruitment level and then invest in building more capacity through the rest of their career.
• As the Indian economy grows, governing it will become more complex, necessitating a proportional enhancement of governance capacities, which this reform undertakes.
• The need of the hour is reforms in the Indian bureaucracy, and a major transformation has been undertaken in recent years.

Other Reforms

• The Government has ended the hegemony of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the apex bureaucratic cadre, for appointments at the level of joint secretary (JS).
  • Instead, appointments to posts have been drawn from other cadres like the Indian Revenue Service, Indian Accounts and Audit Service and the Indian Economic Service.
  • It is estimated that now one in two JS-level officers are drawn from cadres other than the IAS.
• Similarly, the Union government has also encouraged lateral induction of personnel from the private sector.

How will it work?

• The capacity-building programme will be delivered through an Integrated Government Online Training or iGOT-Karmayogi digital platform, with content drawn from global best practices rooted in Indian national ethos.
• The platform will act as a launchpad for the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), which will enable a comprehensive reform of the capacity-building apparatus at the individual, institutional and process levels.
• Throughout their careers, officers will undergo evaluations based on the courses they take to enhance their skills.
• They will actively maintain an online database detailing the courses they complete, their performance, and areas of expertise.
• In case of any future vacancy or if an appointing authority is considering an officer, they can simply see what kind of training the officer has been getting.

iGOT- Mission Karmayogi platform

• iGOT stands for Integrated Govt. Online training’ (iGOT).
• It is a portal on the Ministry of HRD’s DIKSHA platform for capacity building.
• iGOT-Karmayogi is a continuous online training platform, which would allow all government servants from assistant secretary to secretary level to undergo continuous training, depending on their domain areas.
• The platform will provide officers with access to all kinds of courses from international universities.
• The expectation is that the platform will evolve into a vibrant and world-class marketplace for content, offering carefully curated and vetted digital e-learning material.
• In addition to capacity building, the proposed competency framework will eventually integrate service matters such as confirming employment after the probation period, deployment, work assignment, and notification of vacancies.

Benefits of the Mission Karmayogi

• Rule-Based to Role-Based: The program will facilitate a shift from rules-based to roles-based HR management, enabling the matching of an official’s competencies to the requirements of the post for work allocations.
• Domain Training: Apart from domain knowledge training, the scheme will focus on functional and behavioural competencies.
  • It will provide an opportunity for civil servants to continuously build and strengthen their Behavioral, Functional and Domain Competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths.
• Uniform Training Standard: It will harmonise training standards across the country so that there is a common understanding of India’s aspirations and development goals.
• Vision For New India: Mission Karmayogi aims to create a future-ready civil service with the right attitude, skills, and knowledge aligned with the vision of New India.
• On-Site Learning: It will emphasize on ‘on-site learning’ to complement the ‘off-site’ learning.
• Adoption Of Best Practices: It will encourage and partner with the best-in-class learning content creators including public training institutions, universities, start-tips and individual experts.

Challenges

• John Maynard Keynes, the economist, once said that “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
• There is a tendency in the Bureaucracy to resist the change which challenges the status quo.
• The bureaucracy too must understand the need for domain knowledge and the importance of moving away from a generalist to a specialist approach.
• In today’s world governance is getting technical with each passing day and hence the person in authority must have the requisite skill and experience in that particular area.
• Thus, there should be a behavioural change in the bureaucracy too and they must embrace the change as a need of the hour and not an attack on their status quo.
• Moreover, these online courses must not become another opportunity for the officers to go on sabbatical leave.
• Ensure that they attend and actively participate in the courses to prevent the defeat of the purpose.

Conclusion

• While this is a welcome move, it is also a fact that bureaucratic sloth is only one side of the coin.
• Political interference, which manifests itself in transfers, is equally culpable and must be addressed as well.
• Ashok Khemka, the IAS officer from Haryana, provides a living testimony to this, having experienced 52 transfers in his career so far.
• The reform process is not going to be easy but this is a good move in the direction.

Also, check out: ENFORCEMENT DIRECTORATE